I read and relate positively to a surprising proportion of Buddhist and specifically Zen literature. It's surprising because I practice (poorly) another of the world's great religions. I'm drawn in by the way in which the wise people from Zen Buddhism decisively sweep away the things that do not matter and incisively describe the things we all experience but don't often consider. As a wisdom tradition, they've got something to say. Their wisdom cuts neatly against our culture's endless affirmation of everything we think, feel, and say—they tell us to quiet the mind, notice and ignore our feelings, and, to be blunt, to stop. In an accelerating and frenetic pace of activities and considerations, the Zen title says, "don't just do something, sit there." Instead of telling us that our reactions are physical and important, the Buddha tells us our needs and wants hold us captive.Typifying the antagonism the Buddha wants us to have for our desires is this line from the book The Yoga of Work by Andrew Taggart:
Nobody, not even the Buddha, needs to tell you that desire is the seed from which misery sprouts because you can experience this truth for yourself. To be in a state of desire is truly, and by your own reckoning, to be unfree: indeed, to be held captive by your captivation.
The rest of the quotes in this essay come from Taggart's concise book considering what work is and how we best do our work. It's worth considering.
In the middle of writing this, I was given a non-optional request. I needed to go to the basement to cut some wood for one of those projects that your kids (but really you) do. Here I am, aspiring to be a beatific writer, and instead I need to find the right saw and the work area has a closet door on its floor (why?) and the trash someone (me?) left on the saw requires clearing it off and the extension cords are in a National Lampoon-level tangle and really it's not really the right saw for doing these sorts of cuts and ... you know the swirl of emotions that turn into frustration and anger. What was my task? To, literally, chop wood. Where was my mind? On anything but that. I was in such a distracted state, well on a downward spiral, that being near power tools was ill-advised. I'm sure you've been there, when the chore is lightweight compared to the mental burden you have while doing it. The Buddhists force us to ask, where did the frustration come from? Did it originate from the wood? The saw? The closet door on the floor? The child's request? No, none of those "cause" frustration: they are what they are. I brought desires to the work, the first of which being an expectation to not have to do it, and when my fictional desires were not matched in reality, I frustrated myself.
Taggart applies this to work by pointing our attention to what actually bothers us about work. Rarely is it the task itself; it's more often what we bring to and see around the work:
It’s not the act itself that is problematic but the tendencies and tensions that bookend the act that drag in all the trouble.
This insight is at the core of a lot of wisdom teaching. James, the brother of Jesus, echos this in a famous passage, where he states that the cause all manner of bad thinking and bad behavior are our unruled passions and unfulfilled desires. But the wisdom traditions often diverge from useful teaching in what they say to do with this insight. I doubt that anyone can live the monk's life, completely divorced from all desire and all interaction. You can't really renounce ambition, like some of the Stoics seem to say, especially as interpreted by the pop Stoics of today. When it comes to work, you can't not do it. The sawing for the kids project had to happen last night! This is precisely where Taggart's argument caught my attention. He posits that work is what's given to us and that we ought not to turn our backs to it in an effort to keep ourselves pure:
When you turn away from what’s given to you, in what sense aren’t you turning your back on the world?
The teaching becomes not to have no desires or experience no frustrations, but rather to simply notice that when we're frustrated with our work, it's more to do with us than with anything else. In the act of noticing, we separate ourselves from the frustration; in holding it up for inspection, we identify with it less:
I’m not telling you to suppress any of these thoughts or feelings, only to so keenly witness them as to know that you are beyond them. When you experience your being as being beyond these desires, you’ll start to taste a state of desirelessness.
Before Enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
After Enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
Reading
Chop Wood, Carry Water: The Yoga Of Work
More than 8 years after Andrew Taggart began thinking about “total work” (a brief overview can be read on Aeon)—that he self-published a book entitled Chop Wood, Carry Water: The Yoga Of Work. It’s a practical way of reflecting on the role of work in one’s everyday life.